Electrum
by Niclaire
Summary: Malfoy Manor was created for the sole purpose of protecting the Malfoy blood, and the use of an unforgivable curse on its reigning master was the Dark Lord's final mistake. AU in which Lucius Malfoy decides it's time to stop being a minion.


A/N: I am a huge fan of scheming Malfoys and alternative universes. It always irritated me that Slytherins were portrayed in a way that rather belies their supposedly ambitious and cunning natures, and since Malfoy Manor is a house almost as old as Hogwarts, I've decided it would be a handy plot device.

Chapter I – The Once and Future Malfoy

Sometimes, people to the manor born didn't quite deserve what life and fate gave them. Some of them even understood it.

Lucius Malfoy wasn't one of those people for quite a long time.

For most of his life, he was master and commander of his fate, with all that it entailed. Born to parents stuck in different times, brought up by a set of tutors, governesses and house elves, orphaned early enough to never know the resentment of always being treated as an heir, not as a person, Lucius Malfoy wasn't used to doubting himself. His family had a long history of making things happen, of being the power behind the throne, and he started his adult life quite sure that it was his job to continue to uphold the family tradition.

To his seventeen-year-old self, joining the purist faction of the wizarding elite seemed like the best way to do it. It wasn't long after taking the dark mark that he realized it wasn't the most auspicious of ideas. The self-styled Lord Voldemort turned out to be a power-hungry, dangerous terrorist, and not the saviour of the wizarding world the pureblood faction thought him to be. By the time Lily Potter inadvertently vanquished the abomination by means of self-sacrifice, Lucius had already become disillusioned with being a Death Eater (what sane leader would even call his followers – and oh, how Lucius hated being dubbed a follower! – such a thing?). Thus, Potters' death gave him, as to the majority of the wizarding community, a chance of a new start.

It didn't take much to convince the Ministry he had fallen victim to the Imperius curse. At that point, with so many members of the pureblood community dead or imprisoned, they needed to show that not everyone who served Voldemort was beyond redemption, that at least some of them were forced to do so. Lucius himself had no qualms against using it to his advantage, in fact, he made sure to line as many pockets as he needed to for the Wizengamot to rule in his favour when his trial came to pass.

It might have worked the first time, but the second… being caught red-handed inside a highly restricted area of the Ministry, wearing a Death Eater robe and fighting kids led by Harry Potter certainly didn't help his case. Despite his lawyers getting to work almost immediately, it took some time for the Malfoy family fortune to do its magic, while in the meantime, Voldemort seemed to consider it a good idea to punish both Lucius and others apprehended at the time by leaving them to rot in Azkaban… and that was his first mistake.

Lucius was a scion of a family that traced its roots to the Roman empire. His forefather was a close friend to William the Conqueror. While he might have justified to himself being the right hand of Salazar Slytherin's heir when it suited his purpose, he was not going to allow himself the weakness of allowing that final indignity to go unpunished. While awaiting his release from Azkaban, he briefly contemplated the possibility of joining Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix, but quickly decided that it would be better to deal with people who actually could grant him immunity after the war.

Approached by the Malfoy lawyers, Scrimgeour needed a lot of time to agree to Lucius' terms. Armed with the most useful defence of acting under duress, Lucius was to spy for the Ministry, answering only to the Minister himself. Ironically enough, the Malfoy patriarch didn't really get the chance to execute his part of the deal, because Voldemort's actions made it impossible for him to do so... and inadvertently, caused a much quicker resolution of the conflict than even Malfoy himself could expect.

It turned out the Dark Lord thought it a good idea to appropriate Malfoy Manor as his headquarters. That was his second mistake, as far as Lucius Malfoy was concerned.

Not many people knew of the fact, but the Malfoy seat was built over a crossing of ley lines that, in the times before the Christianization of Britain, was used as a druidic ritual site. Armand Malfoi, who first settled the estate in Wiltshire upon the Norman conquest in the eleventh century, used the inherent magic of the place to create a fort that, at the time, was practically impenetrable. As the use of magic evolved, generations of Malfoys heaped on additional layers of protections, some to keep things out, others to keep things in. The wards were rooted in the land, in family blood, and in rituals the origins of which stayed a secret guarded closely by the ruling head of the family.

Malfoy Manor was created for the sole purpose of protecting the Malfoy blood. Lucius wasn't sure how much Bellatrix told the Dark Lord about what she herself knew of the estate, but in the end, it didn't matter. Voldemort wasn't happy that Lucius didn't quietly wait for his mercy in Azkaban. Unhappy Voldemort, especially after his second coming, tended to use Cruciatus first and think later, and the use of an unforgivable curse on the reigning master of Malfoy Manor was the Dark Lord's last mistake.

The curse didn't even leave his mouth before everything froze. Voldemort himself, the Death Eaters present in the drawing room, even Narcissa. The only people who could move inside the Manor when the wards activated themselves were Malfoys by blood and Draco, at the time, was at Hogwarts. Thus, Lucius could calmly look Voldemort in the eye, raise his wand in a ritual gesture, transforming it into the staff it originally was, and, with one movement of his right hand, end the war that devoured Magical Britain for nigh on thirty years.

-;;-

Of course, ending a war is never that easy. Not all Death Eaters were present in the Manor that evening, and Voldemort himself was hardly a person that anyone could imprison. The sheer amount of minutia involved in the Ministry's actions after Lucius notified them that they could take out the rubbish was such that he decided to abandon his plan to spend the next week in the Dower House, and help with the cleanup.

He considered it somewhat ironic that Dumbledore and his Order, who were involved in fighting Voldemort from the very beginning, didn't have much of a hand in actually resolving the problem. Narcissa told him upon her return from the Ministry's holding cells (she was released from custody after questioning - her lack of a dark mark and willingness to submit to veritaserum certainly helped) about the Unbreakable Vow she coerced Severus into, and he would have laughed if he wasn't so irritated. It fell to his wife and a man he always considered his inferior to save his son. The fact that now they didn't have to wasn't much of a consolation, and both he and Narcissa knew that.

The dark lord's blunder might have elevated Lucius into a position even he didn't expect to ever regain, but it created an entirely new balance of power. One he had to think about carefully in order to make sure he took advantage of it to the fullest possible extent.

What ultimately helped him was the fact that Scrimgeour would sooner eat his own heart than ask the Order for help – and Lucius was his best bet at finding who in the Ministry was compromised and who could be used to help with weeding out Voldemort's sympathizers. The irony wasn't lost on Malfoy, who, after years of intrigues, finally found himself on the right side of history, and it was such a novelty for him that he felt he could really take time to regroup and rethink his strategy.

That time, he didn't have. He was thrown into the fray that Voldemort's fall caused in the Ministry, and he really couldn't complain – this was what he needed to do to make sure his family came out on top. Scrimgeour didn't trust him unconditionally, after all – the new minister wasn't born yesterday, he knew Lucius quite well as one of the driving forces of the conservative faction in the Ministry, and this new alliance between them was largely necessity-driven.

In the end, Scrimgeour was an auror. Not a glorified office clerk, like Fudge, and not a scientist with a saviour complex – like Dumbledore. He took what he was left with – the Ministry in disarray, the press pacified by the Minister's office (but dying to bite back), the people in a state of panic – and he ran with it, using skills honed during years of active service as well as during his run as the Head of Auror Office. Those skills were what made him an ideal candidate for a Minister in times of war, but it was the aftermath that would truly take his measure as a leader.

In his youth, Lucius would have been arrogant enough to believe that he was able to exploit the Ministers' weaknesses to make himself indispensible and once again capture the power behind the throne. But Scrimgeour was a Ravenclaw with all the fierceness of a Gryffindor, and Lucius knew he wouldn't be able to influence him like he did Fudge. He wouldn't be swayed by the Malfoy money or splendour of the family, and although the usual Slytherin tactics of flattery and manipulation might work in the longer perspective, Lucius knew he would have to wait to be able to use them on the Minister.

For now, the only venue open to him was to put on a show of good will. It was never something he felt comfortable doing, but there was simply no other way. He had to work on apprehending the remaining Death Eaters and Death Eater sympathizers, had to be seen rubbing arms with Mudbloods and Muggle-lovers, and had to find a way to make peace with Potter, who, despite being sixteen years old, had a lot of sway in the society, especially after it had turned out he was right all along and that for over a year the Ministry was trying to cover up what Potter was saying about Voldemort's return.

All of these things were at the forefront of his mind in the days following Voldemort's capture, but there was one factor he didn't take into account, and though the consequences of his oversight could have been much more dire, he still felt he should have remembered that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Even if that woman was a wife who didn't love him and didn't ever want to be loved by him.


End file.
